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10 Reasons Why Email Marketing Still Works

May 8, 2013

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By: Euan Johnston

Marketing Manager

Bellcom Worldwide

1. Personalisation and Segmentation Email marketing gives you the luxury of quickly personalising campaigns, in order to specifically target your intended audience. If your product or service is intended for a certain demographic, you can easily stylise your emails to reflect their interests. This allows you to target niche markets and make instant changes to make the campaign more effective.

In comparison to a direct mail campaign, this can be done quickly and more efficiently – avoiding printing restrictions and incurring costs.

2. Increased Measurability Email marketing campaigns offer a range of in-depth analytical and tracking tools, allowing you to see who has opened your email and what specific links have been followed. Depending on how inclusive your analysing tool is, you can even profile your ideal customer by finding out a range of demographic information to aid your future campaigns. A great feature is the ‘unsubscribe’ button, which alerts you to those who wish to be removed from your communications – instead of being marked as spam and penalised.

3. Still the Most “Businessy” Medium Although there are upward trends in the way that companies communicate online to provide customer service, when it comes to building business relationships, the best medium is still email. Not only does it suggest a more serious, grown-up conversation, business professionals generally do not go on to social media websites for private, business-related conversations.

4. Volume of Users Email tops the list of active accounts and users, with nearly three times the amount of users than Facebook and Twitter combined. That’s an enormous 2.9 billion users! In other words, both Facebook and Twitter make up just 0.2% of the number of emails sent every day (not including spam). Many modern marketers will state that they’ve “tried it but it didn’t work” but email marketing should be an integral component in your marketing and sales approach.

For instance, if you are targeting an older audience, a lot of your prospects will not have Facebook. The closer you can get to a written letter, the better!

5. Seen as a Transactional Medium Many people expect to receive offers by email and are more likely to be primed and in a buying frame of mind when they view your message. When comparing to other forms of marketing, such as social media marketing, messages get less attention as customers are in a frivolous, non-business or transactional state of mind. People are predominantly on to chat to their friends, share photos and catch up with the celebrities they follow – far from looking for anything to buy.

However, that’s not to say that social media marketing isn’t effective at all – it is still a great way to build brand awareness and get your messages out there.

6. Testing Email marketing allows you to quickly identify sections of your mailing lists that aren’t engaging or responding to your campaigns. This means that you can tweak and revise your messaging to better communicate with your ideal customers. There are several techniques to test your email marketing; whether you chose to split test or try out more involved methods, testing will allow you to tailor emails to address each customer’s interests and needs.

7. Reduced Expenses Direct marketing can incur lots of costs by way of designing, printing and posting expenses. Telemarketing can involve a lengthy process of prospecting for customers, qualifying them and closing the sale. This can put significant pressure on sales teams and absorb a lot of their time. On average, email marketing is likely to cost less than 10% of a direct marketing campaign, whilst reaching a considerably larger audience.

Email marketing can cost as much or as little as you want and has very little up-front costs. Spending less never means compromise. Email marketing allows you to create campaigns quickly and efficiently, without driving up expenses.

8. Less Intrusive Almost everyone at some stage has been disturbed by a cold call or skipped through television adverts to get back to their programme. This is because we are frequently interrupted in prior activity with messages that are often unsolicited. Email marketing works because customers actively open your email and are engaged with your message when they see it. If you’ve done a good job in designing your email, customers will look forward to seeing what you have to say!

9. Targeted Traditional forms of advertising are based on the notion that if you reach out to thousands of people (even if it doesn’t mean anything to some of them) you are likely to receive a few responses. However, email marketing works more efficiently because you are sending out targeted messages to the right audience, which can be based on their preferences, location, local market conditions and other influences.

Email marketing allows you to build lists which can be segmented by age, gender, marital status, income, interests etc.; this eliminates a lot of the uncertainty that makes other forms of marketing ineffective.

10. Interactivity Emails are an amazing marketing tool. Though there are several social media platforms that offer advanced interactivity, email marketing is perhaps the best example of how interactive marketing can take your messages to an entirely different level. Your audience can forward your email to friends, click on your links to view more information, add products and services to their shopping carts, access their personal accounts, update subscriptions, visit and read your blogs, post to your Facebook page and follow you on Twitter – all from one email you send out.

Remember: You can’t click on a newspaper advert!

We have found that email marketing is most effective in a B2B environment if it is followed up within 24 hours. If you have an email marketing project in mind, we’d love to hear from you!